


Portraiture

by lymmea



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Heartbreak, I am so sorry, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-06 21:03:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1111494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lymmea/pseuds/lymmea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bilbo has some skill with portraits. After he comes back from his unexpected journey, he sets to work on making pictures of faces he'll never see again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Portraiture

Even though it takes some time to return home to Bag End - the roads being far quieter doesn’t make them any less long - it’s still well over a month before Bilbo can bring himself to do the thing he wants to do, needs to do, while the memories are still fresh. He knows from experience that the faces of lost loved ones eventually fade, and it was cruel enough to lose Thorin and Fíli and Kíli once. He can’t bear to lose them again, within his own head.

He’d dabbled with sketching before, and indeed had finished a self-portrait he was rather secretly proud of before his unexpected adventure. He has skill enough for something…workable, though even before he starts he knows there are some things he will never have the skill to capture.

He starts with Kíli first, the lines quick and sharp under his pen, and something in the almost reckless movements recalls the dwarf more clearly with every line. He’d expected the process to be agonizing, but it’s surprisingly painless - until he reaches the eyes. In his mind’s eye they’re alive with mischief and a devil-may-care eagerness, and when he tries to set quill to parchment he remembers those eyes are closed forever, his hand shakes, and he can’t come back to it for a week.

He finishes eventually. It’s not to his satisfaction, but he knows it never could be.

Fíli is next, and more of a challenge - the opposite of life, where he’d been the more relaxed and easygoing. But Fíli had complicated braids where Kíli merely had messy hair hanging loose, and Bilbo sometimes has to sit and simply picture him in his mind for many moments before he’s confident enough to add another line. His lines are smoother here, more measured, and that recalls Fíli too. But when he reaches the mouth, thinks of Fíli’s customary little smirk that death wiped forever from his face and of trying to pin the memory of it to paper, he has to rush away before tears can mar his work.

It’s two weeks this time before he can finish it, and like Kíli’s portrait he hates it. The pictures are dead, in ways that the dwarves in his head still are not and never truly will be.

When he comes to Thorin, he has to draw each feature individually, piecing him together over the course of years, and the slow pace essentially defeats the purpose of the project except that he finds the memory never fades at all. He hates it when it’s finished more than all the rest, not because it isn’t good so much as that it can never be good enough - but each portrait is still pressed carefully between the pages of a book to be preserved, like wilted flowers.

**Author's Note:**

> For the record, in my head Bilbo takes that book, with the portraits in it, all the way to the Havens with him.


End file.
